The present invention relates in general to devices and methods for detecting a camera, and in particular for detecting an illegal video camera filming inside a movie theater.
Hollywood studios lose billions of dollars each year in unearned revenues, since pirate organization release bootleg copies of movies by illegally inserting a camera into a movie theater and filming the movie on screen. Sometimes, the movie is pirated during a premier projection and released on the internet on the same day or the very next day. As a result, people can download the movie and watch it for free at home instead of going to the cinema and buying a ticket.
The problem has become even more acute for the studios in recent years due to the following reasons: a) It is not necessary to download anymore an entire film to a computer, a movie can now be streamed to a computer using a high-bandwidth internet connection; b) High definition, large television screens can be connected to a computer, so the user can watch a pirated movie of high quality on a home theater system; and c) It is not necessary anymore to use expensive equipment to pirate movies. Nowadays, many smartphones with a camera such as Apple's iPhone™ or other smartphones have enough memory to record an entire movie with a good resolution of 5-8 megapixel. These reasons offer an appealing incentive to illegally record movies, share them on the Web and watch them comfortably.
The studios have tried to fight this undesired phenomenon in several ways: a) Antipiracy organizations such as the Movie Picture Association of America (MPAA) prepare and file laws against individuals who record, share or even view pirated movies; b) Movie theatre managers hire specialists with special equipment to detect illegal camera usage during screening, these people may even use night goggles to be able to see the audience and what he is doing; and c) Offer a financial compensation for anybody who provides information about pirate activities. All these methods cost a lot of money to the studios and yet every year the numbers of films pirated increases.
Some automatic devices have been developed in order to automatically detect a camera that is filming in a movie theater. These devices are expensive to be installed in movie theaters and are based only on lenses detection using the retro-reflective physical principal and in addition suffer from a relatively high period for scanning all the seats in the movie theater. If a person holds a mobile phone without intension, and the camera's side faces the screen, the existing solutions can falsely detect the person as a pirate. There is thus a need in the industry for a solution that will calculate for how long a camera is facing the screen and thus only point out a pirate usage if the camera is facing the screen for a substantial period of time.